[Haskell-cafe] Re: A question about "monad laws"

[Yitzchak Gale]

Jerzy Karczmarczuk wrote:
> Would you say that *no* typical floating-point software is reliable?

It depends on how you define "reliable".

Floating point intentionally trades accuracy for speed,
leaving it to the user to worry about round-off errors.
It is usually not too hard to get the probability of
failure somewhat low in practice, if you don't require
a proof.

It used to be true - and may still be - that the engineers
who implement floating point in the hardware of our
CPUs would never fly on commercial airliners. Would you?

Would you entrust your country's nuclear arsenal to an
automated system that depends on floating point arithmetic?

Regards,
Yitz